National Gallery of Art, Washington, May 2–September 20, 2026

Niagara Falls: Mist and Majesty probes the layered histories of Niagara Falls from the early 19th century to today. Indigenous peoples have long made spiritual and territorial claims over the falls as a sacred site or a homeland and from the 1600s, the land around the falls belonged to the Seneca of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. After Europeans arrived, they too recognized the majesty of the falls and soon embraced it as a powerful symbol of the newly formed nation, the United States of America. Beginning in the 1840s thousands of enslaved people crossed the Niagara River north to their freedom. Over time, generations of preservationists, artists, tourists, honeymooners, daredevils, and profiteers have frequented the falls, which today continue to inspire awe and wonder.

This exhibition marks the bicentennial of celebrated landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church’s birth in 1826. His iconic panorama Niagara (1857) anchors a presentation of approximately 20 works that reveal evolving perspectives about the falls. Niagara Falls: Mist and Majesty includes 19th-century prints, drawings, and photographs by artists such as Régis François Gignoux and Platt D. Babbitt that captured the experience of visiting the site. Some of these pictures, such as an 1880 photograph by George Barker, also played a role in the preservation movement led by Church and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Other works emphasize the waterfall’s importance to enslaved people seeking their freedom.

A video work by Shelley Niro (Mohawk [Six Nations of the Grand River, Brantford, Ontario]) and a recently acquired painting by Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) highlight the significance of Niagara Falls to Indigenous peoples. Drawing on the longstanding popularity of Niagara Falls as a tourist attraction, a self-portrait taken by Tseng Kwong Chi subtly plays with the conventions of tourist photography to explore national identity and perceptions of cultural difference, while contemporary photographs by Alec Soth reveal the people—both resident and visiting—who now populate a place radically altered from the wild beauty of Church’s painting.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The exhibition is curated by Sarah Cash, associate curator, department of American and British paintings, and Diane Waggoner, curator of photographs, department of photographs, both of the National Gallery of Art.